As clashes in Ukraine claimed their first victims, Russia denounced the violence as a coup attempt and slammed the West.

Two men died from gunshot wounds in violent confrontation of protesters with police in the Ukrainian capital Kiev, health authorities said. Police denied they were using live ammunition, and it was not clear whether the fatal injuries had been caused by rubber bullets.

The number of police officers wounded in the three days of clashes rose to 197, Ukraine’s Interior Ministry said. Opposition said hundreds of its activists had been injured.

Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovich began talks with opposition leaders on Wednesday afternoon in an attempt to resolve the crisis.

The Russian Parliament said Ukraine was sliding into “civil conflict.”

A strong-worded statement unanimously passed by the State Duma, the Russian lower house, on Wednesday described the violent protests in Ukraine as an “attempt to forcefully overthrow the legitimate government institutions.” (or Ukrainian "transition", in ZOG speak...)

Russian legislators blamed the violence on the Ukrainian opposition’s “extremist wing,” as well Western politicians, who “blatantly interfere” in Ukraine’s internal affairs.

“The State Duma urges Western political circles to stop meddling in the internal affairs of sovereign Ukraine in violation of international law and stop contributing to further escalation of the conflict,” the statement said.

Caitlin Hayden, a spokesman for U.S. National Security Council, blamed the Ukraine President for the violence and urged him to withdraw the riot police from downtown Kiev.

Ukrainian analyst Mikhail Pogrebinsky said such Western reaction encouraged protesters to continue violence.

Rada Re-Criminalizes Public Denial Or Justification Of Crimes Of Fascism

The parliament has re-introduced criminal and administrative punishment for public denial or justification of the crimes of fascism.

The relevant draft law (No. 4038) was approved by 257 votes; only 226 votes were required for its approval.

This draft law was put to the vote without a debate as part of a package including the draft laws Nos. 4030, 4037, and 4039.

The law adds Article 436-1 (public denial or justification of the crimes of fascism, promotion of neo-Nazi ideology, and production and (or) distribution of materials justifying fascist crimes and their supporters) to the Penal Code.

The law introduces a fine of 500-1,000 minimum nontaxable incomes, restraint of liberty for up to two years, or imprisonment for the same period for public denial or justification of fascism's crimes against humanity during the Second World War, particularly the crimes of the Waffen SS organization, its subordinate structures, and people who fought against the anti-Hitler coalition and collaborated with Nazi occupiers, as well as promotion of neo-Nazi ideology, and manufacturing and/or dissemination of materials justifying the crimes of fascists and their supporters.

The aim of the document is to protect the historical memory of the events that took place during the Great Patriotic War and prevent manifestations of neo-fascism in Ukraine.

The authors of the draft law are parliamentary deputies Petro Symonenko and Ihor Alekseev (both members of the Communist Party faction).

As Ukrainian News earlier reported, the Verkhovna Rada introduced criminal and administrative responsibility for public denial or justification of the crimes of fascism on January 16.

In December 2011, Parliamentary Deputy Volodymyr Matveev of the Communist Party proposed that the parliament criminalize the importation, manufacture, and distribution of products promoting Nazism and fascism (the draft law No. 9559).

The draft law No. 9559 has not yet been considered, but the Parliamentary Committee on Legislative Support for Law Enforcement has recommended that the parliament reject the draft law.

Prime Minister Mykola Azarov opposes revision of the historical assessment of the Great Patriotic War.

“Some people are constantly insisting on the necessity to divide up our country and are trying to spread this theory.”

Reuters would also quote President Putin as saying:

“There are those who would like to build a unipolar world, who would themselves like to rule all of humanity.”

While Reuters then attempted to spin the comments as Russian paranoia, in the wake of recent events in Ukraine, the timelessness and accuracy of President Putin’s assessment years ago are apparent.

Setting the Board

For years the West has been cultivating a proxy political machine inside of Ukraine for the purpose of peeling the nation away from its historical and socioeconomic ties to Russia. The deep relationship between Western corporate-financier interests on Wall Street and in London and the opposition in Ukraine are best summarized in PR Weeks “Analysis: PR gets trodden underfoot as sands shift in Ukraine.” In the article, the involvement of some of the most notorious corporate lobbying firms on Earth, including Bell Pottinger and the Podesta Group, are revealed to have been involved in Ukraine’s internal affairs since the so-called “Orange Revolution” in 2004 – a coup admittedly orchestrated by the West and in particular the US government.

The article chronicles (and defends) the continuing, unabated meddling of the West up to and including the most recent turmoil consuming Ukraine.

PR Week’s article revealed that heavily funded networks propping up the proxy regime in Kiev are sponsored by “individuals and private companies who support stronger EU-Ukraine relations.” It is these Western corporate-financier interests, not Ukrainian aspirations for “democracy” and “freedom,” that kicked off the “Euromaidan” mobs in the first place – and will be the driving force that misshapes and deforms the regions of western Ukraine now overrun by the West’s proxies.

To the east in Ukraine, people are prominently pro-Russian, sharing closer cultural, linguistic, and socioeconomic ties to Russia as well as long historical parallels. They have welcomed moves by Russia to counter the coup in Kiev and protect eastern Ukraine from the corrosive influence that will grow as the West further entrenches itself.

A democratic referendum held on the Crimea peninsula overwhelmingly chose independence from the fascist regime in Kiev, separating from the now dysfunctional and downward spiraling western region and beginning the process of formally joining the Russia Federation. This resulting lay of Ukraine will be a proving ground where in the West, Wall Street and London’s unipolar order, will face off against the East and Russia’s vision of a multipolar order. The predictable outcome of financial and social ruination in the West, versus a stable status quo in the East will vindicate the growing perceptions held regarding both.

The Predictable Fate of Western Ukraine Already Unfolding

With the vacant chair of deposed Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych still warm, the tentacles of Western corporate-financier interests have already wound themselves around Kiev and have begun to squeeze.

Chevron, which had signed a multi-billion dollar deal with Ukraine in November, 2013, was operating in the west of Ukraine, and alongside other Western energy giants such as ExxonMobil and Shell. The deals were part of President Yanukovych’s apparent gravitation toward the West and impending integration with the EU which was then suddenly overturned in favor with re-cementing ties with Russia. Western oil giants clearly saw the benefit of backing a putsch that would leave the western half firmly in the orbit of the US, UK, and EU. They can not only continue their business on the western edge of Ukraine, but expand their interests unabated across the country now that a capitulating, puppet regime sits in Kiev.

While Western big-oil plans to move in and siphon billions, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) is already planning deep cuts in social benefits as part of a staggering austerity regime to restructure financially the seized western region of Ukraine, and if possible, all of Ukraine proper.

RT reported in its article, “Pensions in Ukraine to be halved – sequestration draft,” that:

The self-proclaimed government in Kiev is reportedly planning to cut pensions by 50 percent as part of unprecedented austerity measures to save Ukraine from default. With an “empty treasury”, reduction of payments might take place in March.

According to the draft document obtained by Kommersant-Ukraine, social payments will be the first to be reduced.

The proxy regime set up in Kiev has already indicated its eager acceptance to all IMF conditions. The fate of western Ukraine will be no different than other members of the European Union preyed upon by the corporate-financier interests that created the supranational consolidation in the first place. The reduction of a multipolar Europe into a unipolar, supranational consolidation which can be easily and collectively looted is a microcosm of what the West’s Fortune 500 plan as part of their global unipolar order.

The natural resources, human capital, and geopolitical advantages found within the borders of Ukraine, will now become the natural resources, human capital, and geopolitical advantages of Chevron, BP, Monsanto, a myriad of defense contractors, telecom corporations, and other familiar brands seen marauding across the planet leaving in its wake destitution, socioeconomic disparity, and perpetual division they intentionally sow in order to protect their holdings from any form of unified or organized opposition.

No matter how obvious the West’s game may be to some, had Ukraine fallen entirely under the control of Western interests, a multitude of excuses could and would have been peddled to explain the unraveling of Ukrainian society in terms that would exonerate the corporate-financier interests truly driving the crisis. But Ukraine has not entirely fallen to the West, and because of that, the planned decimation of western Ukraine, its economy, and its sovereignty will stand out in stark contrast to the eastern region that has remained beyond the West’s reach and within the orbit of Russia’s multipolar vision of the future.

The East’s Chance to Showcase a Multipolar Future

The West has made an entire industry out of “democracy promoting,” or in other words, the facade and insidious geopolitical mechanics behind it, it spreads its hegemony across the globe with. It has ingrained its superficial and ultimately disingenuous definitions of “elections,” “democracy,” and “freedom” into the minds of millions through political movements, mass media, and entertainment. However, this facade in recent years has suffered many setbacks as its opponents poke holes through it and reveals what lies beneath more clearly.

What must be done next is the introduction of a new set of principles by which the global population can embrace – that of a multipolar world order where power is balanced, national sovereignty reigns, and international institutions mediate, not dictate, the interactions and conduct between nation-states.

Unlike the West’s unipolar order which depends on the massive and perpetual manipulation of public perception to maintain itself, a multipolar world must be promoted through transparent, demonstrated examples. Russia’s evolving relationship with Ukraine, particularly in the midst of the recent turmoil in Kiev, will help demonstrate both the folly of dealing with the West and its global supranational consolidation and the benefits of maintaining traditional, sovereign bi-lateral relations with other states.

Already, Russia has exhibited crucial differences in its foreign policy – its stationing of troops in Ukraine already covered under long-standing treaties and their mission clearly provoked by documented extremists admitted even across the Western press as being armed and promoting universally unacceptable and dangerous ideologies rooted in racism, bigotry, and genocide.

While the West eagerly traverses the globe thousands of miles from its borders, under patently false, fabricated pretenses (such as in Iraq) to execute military force against nations that posed it no conceivable threat and in hindsight its motives being clearly self-serving, Russia has waited perhaps too long to act directly along its own borders against clear and present dangers being fomented overtly by foreign interests openly seeking to encircle and overrun Russia itself.

This difference in foreign policy and indeed in the vision the West and East hold for the future – one of unipolar global domination and the other of multipolar coexistence – will be tested in Ukraine in front of the world. While the West has little choice but to continue along its long-established trajectory toward confrontation and exploitation, Russia and its growing list of allies has an opportunity to offer an alternative, not only to solve its own problems along its border – but for other nations as well chaffing under the growing disparity created by the West’s antiquated paradigm.

Igor Kolomoisky, owner of 1+1 TV, not only directed his channels, which have nearly 11 percent of market share, to begin more balanced coverage early on, he accepted an offer from Kiev’s interim government to head the regional government in his native Dnipropetrovsk region in eastern Ukraine, where he controls a large share of industry and other businesses.

“I agreed, because the homeland is in danger,” Mr Kolomoisky, a prominent member and supporter of the country’s Jewish community, told the Financial Times.

“The West must understand that, to Russia, Ukraine can never be just a foreign country. Russian history began in what was called Kievan-Rus. The Russian religion spread from there. Ukraine has been part of Russia for centuries, and their histories were intertwined beforethen. — Henry Kissinger, Washington Post, March 6, 2014

“Ukraine, a new and important space on the Eurasian chessboard, is a geopolitical pivot because its very existence as an independent country helps to transform Russia. Without Ukraine, Russia ceases to be a Eurasian empire.” — Zbigniew Brzezinski, The Grand Chessboard (1998)

Russia has taught the United States a stern and embarrassing lesson in Ukraine as a riposte to Washington-backed regime change in Kiev, the capital. “So far,” Moscow in effect warned a thoroughly shocked Washington, “but no further.” Crimea was integrated into the Russian Federation after a Referendum.

Nothing quite like this move on the geopolitical chessboard has happened since the U.S. became the world’s single superpower over two decades ago.

The objective of the Obama Administration’s support for a coup to remove an essentially neutral Ukrainian government (though neighborly toward Russia) was to install a regime leaning toward — and economically dependent upon — the United States and the European Union. The purpose is to compromise Russia’s revival as a regional power critical of U.S. policies.

The neutrality of the Kiev government, if not close ties, is exceptionally important to Moscow for its own long-term regional goals, and it will work toward repairing relations in time. Considerable support for Russia remains in the country.

Washington was obviously disoriented by Russia’s unexpected move in Ukraine, and perhaps even more so when Putin shrugged off President Obama’s subsequent threats. But for all the anti-Russia rhetoric, sanctions and other punishments emanating from the U.S. and EU, the danger of an armed clash or greatly heightened East-West tensions is relatively remote at the moment, but if the confrontations continue there may be more serious problems ahead.

Ukrainian national security service has put Crimea’s chief prosecutor Natalia Poklonskaya on its wanted list. She is charged of taking actions aimed at the violent overthrow of constitutional order and takeover of government power.

Poklonskaya took the office as Crimea defied the coup-imposed government in Kiev and sought independence from Ukraine. After the peninsula joined the Russian Federation, she was appointed as Crimea's acting chief prosecutor by Russia’s General Prosecutor Yury Chaika.

The Ukrainian National Service for Security and Defense accuse her of violating article 109 of the Criminal Code, which deals with overthrow of the government.

Poklonskaya became somewhat of an internet sensation due you relative youth, attractive appearance and emotional media conferences. A number of anime-style drawings of the official are currency circulation on the web, with many supporters calling her ‘kawaii prosecutor’ after the Japanese term for cuteness.

The now-wanted in Ukraine officer of the law is somewhat irritated with her web popularity, she told the media, because it undermines the serious nature of her job.

Last week the Ukrainian security service said it was investigating 22 alleged cases under Article 109. Seven of the alleged ‘separatists’, as Kiev calls them, are under arrest. Among those charged are several leaders of protests in eastern Ukraine, which defied the new authorities.

VIDEO. Ukrainian deposed president "can not accept" the loss of Crimea

Ukraine's ousted president said Wednesday no " to accept " the annexation of Crimea to Russia , blaming this loss on the new authorities in Kiev. " What, as president , should I take when the country collapses ? " Has he said , responding to a question about his position on the annexation of Crimea to Russia , considered by Westerners as an outright annexation. " If this had happened when I was in power, I would have tried to prevent it ," said he added during the interview, broadcast on cable television channel and satellite dojd .

Taking care not to condemn Moscow, Bakiyev made ​​the new pro-European Kiev authorities responsible for the loss of the peninsula. "This is their radical position on the Russian language, covering territories where Russian-speaking people live " , which caused discontent among Russian-speaking Crimea continued Viktor Yanukovych. "Attempts to dictate to the people how they should live have resulted in what they are protesting ," he has said.

tensions

"This is a striking example , when the population of an important region holds a referendum on the bottom of protest and separates fact from Ukraine. Personally, I can not accept this," he renchéri .

Since the end of February overthrow President Viktor Yanukovych and the arrival of a pro-European power in Kiev , serious tensions have emerged in Russian-speaking regions in the east and southeast of the country.

After a referendum in less than two weeks in Crimea , Moscow proceeded to attachment of this territory to Russia last month.

(Cue the owners of Jewkraine rewriting the Constitution, even more IMF "loans" and so on)

Jewish Foreign Minister of France, Laurent Fabius told reporters that most European countries are not yet ready to see Ukraine as a member of the European Union, despite pro-European aspirations of President Poroshenko.

"When I talk to my European colleagues, I come to conclusion that the idea of ​​Ukraine's accession to the EU does not find support with most of them. It's obvious," the minister said, ITAR-TASS reports.

According to the minister, Poroshneko's inaugural speech was "clearly pro-European" in nature. Perhaps, it was even more pro-European "than the EU would like it to be," he said.

According to Fabius, none of his "Western colleagues wants Ukraine to join NATO either." "Even the Americans do not want that," he believes.

Fabius also confirmed that France did not intend to violate the contract for the delivery of two Mistral ships to Russia. "The deal was signed back in 2011; the first ship is ready," said the French minister.

Interestingly, the so-called "revolution of dignity" in Ukraine, which, in fact, turned out to be the triumph of oligarchy and fascism, had European integration as one of its main tasks.

These four politicians have two things in Common: (1) They all wield tremendous influence in the new Jew-controlled Ukraine. (2) They are ALL Jews. Far right, Ukraine’s new Prime Minister, Arsiniy Yatsenuk, a Jew (see below); next to him, American Secretary of State John Kerry, who recently discovered his “Jewish roots“; left of Kerry, Ukraine’s recently elected President, Petro Poroshenko, another Jew (see below); far left, Vitali Klitschko, Jewish boxer politician whose father served in the Bolshevik “Red” army.

The recent shock revelation that Ukraine’s new president, Petro Poroshenko, is Jewish, as is the country’s coup-installed Prime Minister, Arseniy Yatsenuk, has come as a stunning body blow to many Ukrainians. This is because Ukraine happens to be one of the most anti-Semitic nations on earth, and not without good reason.

In parts of Ukraine, Russia and Poland where the Jewish moneylender had long been an unmitigated scourge, peasants would often do the sign of the cross over themselves when they saw a party of Jews passing by. The Jew became shorthand for the Devil. In parts of Rumania, especially in Transylvania and the Carpathian mountains, it was the vampire that came to symbolize the predatory, bloodsucking Jew.

For centuries, Ukraine has had a Jewish problem as acute, if not more acute, than most of the other European nations around it. This is partly due to the presence in Ukraine of a large number of Jews who were seen as ruthless exploiters of the peasantry. (See “The Jew and the Peasant”, here).

Anti-Semitism in Ukraine reached its dizzy peak, however, in the 1930s and can be summed up in one word: Holodomor.

Holodomor, the Ukrainian word for “famine genocide”, was the man-made famine that killed 7-10 million people in Ukraine in 1932-1933. This was a genocidal program of monstrous cruelty carried out at the behest of Stalin’s Jewish Bolshevik regime. The Ukrainians remember only too well that it was Jewish commissars, in particular the Jewish mass murderer Lazar Kaganovich, who stood by and watched gloatingly as the Ukrainians starved to death.

Kaganovich, Stalin’s closest Jewish friend, set out to destroy family farms through starvation in pursuit of the Communist policy of “collectivization”, whereby peasants were made landless and then forced to work for the state as virtual slaves.

Kaganovich was aided and abetted in this by another Jew, Gengrich Yagoda, founder of the NKVD or Soviet secret police who also happened, incidentally, to be a lingerie pervert. Yuri Slezkine, in The Jewish Century, notes: “The secret police was one of the most Jewish of all Soviet institutions” (p.254). Arno J. Mayer, in Why Did the Heavens Not Darken, adds: “As of the late twenties, a disproportionate number of Jews came to hold high posts in the secret police and to serve as political commissars in the armed services. They were appointed to high-level and conspicuous positions” (p.60).
Mayer, a professor emeritus of history at Princeton, is himself Jewish — as is Slezkine.

Another Bolshevik, Nikolai Yezhov, identified by Bro Nathaneal Kapner as Jewish (here), was probably not Jewish but had married a Jewish wife and was always surrounded by Jews, as the thoroughly Jewified Stalin himself tended to be. Lazar Kaganovich was his patron. Yezhov, a repulsive bisexual midget (151 centimeters tall) known as “the Dwarf”, also played a major part in the mass starvation of Ukrainain peasants — while he was not organizing “farting competitions” for trouserless commissars which involved the use of cigarette ash. (See here, p. 174)

Apart from Kaganovich, there were other Jews who contributed to the massacre of Christians in Ukraine and the Soviet Union under the cruelest circumstances: Ilya Ehrenburg, Natalfy Frenkel, Mathias Berman, Genrikh Yagoda (the lingerie fetishist mentioned above), and, last but not least, Lavrenti Beria — rumored to be a “secret Jew.” (See Simon Sebag Montfiore, Stalin, The Court of the Red Tsar, p. 560) Beria was not only a mass murderer of peasants, but also a bloodthirsty sex maniac and pedophile who tortured and buried dozens of children in his basement — probably alive. (See here and here, pp. 516-519 ).

When absolute power meets absolute evil, then we have — what?
The reign of Satan.

Here are some Robert Conquest quotes from The Harvest of Sorrow (Oxford University Press, 1987). This is what Ukrainians had to go through at the hands of the Bolshevik regime. There are many Ukrainians alive today who are haunted by their memories of that time. They, too, are “Holocaust survivors”, but the people they hate are not Nazis but Jews:

“A quarter of the rural population, men, women and children, lay dead or dying in a great stretch of territory with some forty million inhabitants… like one vast Belsen…. The rest, in various stages of debilitation… had no strength to bury their families or neighbours…. [As at Belsen] well-fed squads of police or party officials supervised the victims.

A population of “walking corpses” … even ate horse-manure for the whole grains of seed it contained. … Cannibalism became so common-place that… local authorities issued hundreds of posters announcing that “EATING DEAD CHILDREN IS BARBARISM.”

They staggered into towns and collapsed in the squares…. Haunting the railway stations these “swollen human shadows, full of rubbish, alive with lice,” followed passengers with mute appeals…. [They] dragged themselves along, begging for bread or searching for scraps in garbage heaps, frozen and filthy. Each morning wagons rolled along the streets picking up the remains of the dead…. Some were picked up before they died and buried in pits so extensive that they resembled sand dunes and so shallow that bodies were dug up and devoured by wolves.”

See, Holocaust and Holodomor: ‘Origins of Anti-Semitism’, by Nicholas Lysson, “Role of Jews in the Ukrainian Framine.

Food as a weapon

♣
While it is interesting to note that both Poroshenko and Yatsenuk have done their best, understandably, to hide their Jewish roots in Jew-hating Ukraine, it is even more interesting to see how their “secret” Jewish roots have been exposed by reputable Jewish sources including The Daily Forward and Israel’s Haaretz newspaper.

In a country that has suffered a genocidal man-made famine at the hands of Jewish Bolsheviks, where the word “Zhyd” (Jew) is the dirtiest word in the Ukrainian language, it comes as no surprise to learn that both Poroshenko and Yatsenyuk should try their best to hide their Jewish roots.
According to the Jewish Daily Forward article, Poroshenko’s spokeswoman asked Forbes Israel to remove her boss’s name from a list of the world’s richest Jews. (See here)

The same skullduggery applies to Ukraine’s Prime Minister, Arseniy Yetsenuk, affectionately known as “Yats” to his Jewish American patron and puppet mistress Victoria Nuland.

Apparently Yatsenyuk, who tries to pretend he is pure Ukrainian, was “born in Chernivtsi in 1974 to Jewish-Ukraininan parents”, according to Oxford Analytica, an independent strategic consulting firm based at Oxford University that draws on a network of 1000 scholarly experts from around the world.

In October 2009, Israel’s Haaretz newspaper published an article urging Yatsenuk to come clean and proudly declare his Jewish heritage, instead of shamefully passing himself off as a gentile. It describes efforts by Ukrainian Jewish leaders to get Yatsenyuk to out himself as a Jew:“Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad apparently is not Jewish, but there’s a chance the candidate for the presidency in Ukraine elections in January 2010, Arseny Petrovich Yatsenyuk, is a Jew after all,” the newspaper declared.

About three weeks ago Yuri Dubinsky, wearing a black skullcap, appeared on TV, introducing himself as the chairman of the Jewish community of Kharkov. Apparently this is a matter of controversy, but Dubinsky declared he was speaking not only in the name of all the Jews of Kharkov, and not just in the name of all the Jews of Ukraine, but for the entire Jewish people. He does not belong to any party, he said, but he will support Yatsenyuk because of his Jewish origin.

In the name of the Jewish people, he demanded the candidate not be ashamed and declare himself a proud Jew.
Not only is his mother a scion of the ancient family whose members “wrote the Talmud,” but his wife, Tereza, is the scion of the glorious Gur dynasty, which includes Israel’s foreign minister.
Followers of the Lubavitcher Rebbe also published a long letter condemning Yatsenyuk for denying his Jewishness.
♣
It almost beggars belief to learn that Ukraine, a land of inveterate Jew haters fresh with their memories of the Holodomor genocide, should find itself saddled with a Jewish president as well as a Jewish prime minister. To rub salt into the wound, it is a Jew, Victoria Nuland, who helped to shoehorn Poroshenko and Yatsenuk into power with the help of $5 billion belonging to the American taxpayer.

The corporate vultures, many from America and the Nato countries, now gather round the corpse of Ukraine, ready to pick it dry. Privatization is again the name of the game. The Jewish oligarchs are limbering up to do a repeat performance of what their co-ethnics did to the Soviet Union in the time of Boris Yeltzin: to raid the till, to steal the family silver.

Both Poroshenko and Yatsenuk are only too eager to hand Ukraine over to the tender mercies of the IMF — to austerity, unemployment, and grinding poverty. The many will suffer, the few will thrive. And those who will do best out of this newest exercise in the plunder of a nation will be the Jews.
Ukraine might as well be renamed “Jewcraine”.
It has now become Zionist America’s new Jewish colony.

Ukraine's porous borders make it a favoured entry point to the European Union (EU) for asylum seekers.

But a new treaty strengthening EU ties means many more will end up in Ukraine's detention centres and prisons. At a refugee hostel in the Ukrainian town of Mukachevo near the Slovakian border African refugees live in limbo.

If you think there's a way we can make ourselves heard, please help
"I have been here nine months," said a Sudanese man who asked for his name to be withheld. "Nobody has come to help us with the language, there has been no help with jobs."

While conditions seemed clean and rooms were small but not overcrowded, the refugees complained about out-of-date food and a lack of support services.

Ukraine remains an important point of transit for thousands of undocumented migrants and asylum seekers from Africa and Asia who are attempting to enter the EU, which it borders.

Conditions for many have only got worse since the violence in the country earlier this year, and with the government's agreement to act as a tougher surveillance force to protect the EU's eastern frontier.

In September, refugees in Mukachevo told The Africa Report that in the past three months conditions in the hostel had got worse.
Supplies of food and toiletries had been reduced and they were told that this was because aid had been cut.

"If you think there's a way we can make ourselves heard, please help," one implored.

A Somali man named Cherko Ali said that some of them had been given work at a plastics factory close to Mukachevo, but had quit after being subjected to racist abuse.

The decision was supported by 233 deputies out of 329 registered in the session hall, according to an UNIAN correspondent.

The vote was highly important for the financially crippled state, as it could unlock further much-needed funding from the country’s international creditors.

The vote came at 0424 in the morning after hours of debates and delays. Some MPs were pictured dozing at their desks.

When the vote finally came, the breakdown was: the Bloc of Petro Poroshenko 120 votes, the Popular Front 81 votes, the Samopomich Party 10 votes, the Radical Party 17 votes, independent MPs 5 votes, and the Opposition Bloc, the Batkivshyna Party, Volia and Economic Development factions zero votes each.

The budget for 2015 is calculated from the forecast of the economic decline of 4.3% with an inflation rate of 13%.

On Sunday night, at the beginning of the lengthy Rada sitting, the Verkhovna Rada also adopted a package of bills needed to prop up the revenues side of the budget.

Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseniy Yatseniuk, while presenting the budget said, that the document would be revised - depending on agreements reached later with creditors.

The first such review will take place no later than February 15, 2015, he said.

"The Ukrainian budget has allocated UAH 90 billion for security and defense, about UAH 6 billion of which will be state guarantees for the state concern Ukroboronprom for the purchase and production of weapons," Yatseniuk said.

Immigration to Israel under its Law of Return increased in the first quarter of 2015 by 41 percent over the corresponding period last year.

Approximately a third of the 6,499 newcomers who landed at Ben Gurion Airport in the first three months of 2015 were from Ukraine, and more than half were from the former Soviet Union, according to an interim report by the Jewish Agency for Israel released earlier this month.

While the world’s focus is on Greece, Ukraine is being ignored. However, the devastated nation makes Greece look like an economic success story. It’s now a ‘Banana Republic,’ without bananas.

In the era of instant news, we are now in Athens overkill. There hasn’t been five minutes this past week when some news channel hasn’t managed to produce a starving pensioner or despairing youth to illustrate how miserable Greek life is. However, there’s another European country where existence is even grimmer - Ukraine. Despite this, much of the same media presents the war torn country as a positive example of Western intervention.

Nevertheless, the fact remains that Ukraine’s economy atrophied by 28 percent in 2014. From a nominal GDP of $182 billion (1.566 trillion hryvnia at 8.1 to $1) to one of $62 billion (1.465 trillion hryvnia), when adjusted for the collapse of the hryvnia currency. In 2013, the average wage was already a pitiful $410 a month under the democratically elected - but horrid - Viktor Yanukovich government. Now, after the Washington and Brussels-backed Maidan coup, it sits at $184 monthly. This makes me very sad and angry. For the simple reason that I like Ukraine, very much.

Here are a few more catastrophic and depressing economic figures to further dampen the mood. Since the coup, new car purchases have decreased by 76 percent and vehicle production by a whopping 93 percent. Steel production has recoiled by a third. Meanwhile, gasoline sales are down by 40 percent. Additionally, inflation (officially) has increased by 61percent, year on year (April 2014-April 2015).

For far too long, those of us with a genuine affection for Ukraine have allowed anti-Russia activists and Western media chancers to hijack debate about the country. Many actual Ukraine experts understood clearly that the Maidan movement was going to end in disaster and took this unpopular - in the West - view from the very start. Instead of being listened to, these sensible voices were branded as “Putin stooges” and “Ukraine haters” by people with hardly any credentials to comment on the situation at all. Indeed, quite a few hacks that landed in Kiev early last year, pushing a pro-NATO/EU line, are now in Greece playing the exact same trick. Actually, some previously pulled the same stunt in Syria and Iran.

Ukraine - truths and distortions
What actually happened at ‘Euromaidan’ is rather different from how the Western media has reported the story. The collective line is that a ‘revolution of dignity’ overthrew a horrible regime and immediately began transforming the country into a modern progressive democracy. This agenda is served by countless compositions extolling the virtues of the post-coup leaders. These read more like puff PR than serious news analysis. Here’s a really good example from The Financial Times this week. Read it and ask yourself how much a local advert rag would charge for such a loving write-up? Yet the FT is held up as a paragon of journalistic virtue by Western think-tanks and educational institutions.

All this reportage is total codswallop, and usually written to order by eager-to-please stringers desperate to either revive flagging careers or kick start nascent paths in journalism. Sometimes they don’t even need the template actually spelled out to them because the rules are obvious. We all know that anybody remotely seen as being sympathetic to the Russian point of view simply cannot get published in almost all Western mainstream media these days. Hence, for a young hack eager to prosper, the obvious path is being as anti-Russian as possible.

Anyway, what really happened in Kiev is that the “Euromaidan” episode didn’t herald a new dawn for principled democracy in Ukraine. It merely replaced one corrupt gang of oligarchic leeches with another. Now Ukraine has the richest head of state in Europe, the billionaire Petro Poroshenko, while paying its pensioners Ł5 a week. Ukraine makes Greece look like Narnia.

What you will never read in the Western press, by the way, is that the same Poroshenko served as Minister for Trade in Yanukovich’s government until December 2012. The same ‘regime’ that delivered average salaries over double what Poroshenko’s ‘modernizing government’ currently manages. Last year, he sponsored a ‘lustration’ law, aimed at purging members of Yanukovich’s administration from state governance. People just like himself.

Poroshenko's mendacity
As the Canadian writer Halyna Mokrushnyna pointed out in an essential piece last week, there is also the issue of Poroshenko’s serial fibbing. “Lies about a promised visa-free regime to Europe that has "acquired a fixed place in the calendar for the first time,” Poroshenko says in his speech, in spite of public statements of European officials saying that they cannot name a date for the introduction of visa-free entry to Europe for Ukrainians. Lies about plans to hold a referendum on Ukraine's joining NATO, which "we would have easily won,” but will not held because "this issue will shake the country" and its unity. "So is Ukraine united in this issue or no, Mr. President?” Mokrushnyna asked.

The Russian domestic press often features must-read analysis of Ukraine, but obvious issues with language prevent it being widely read in the West. Thus, I feel obliged to select some points from this marvelous Korrespondent article from Yuri Lukashin. Lukashin asserts that Ukraine is now "a banana republic without bananas." Furthermore, he insists that the nation is committing suicide. There is plenty of logic in his reasoning.

Ukraine’s income levels were already pathetic by European standards under the previous set of ‘kleptocratic’ leaders. Under the new gang of (Washington-approved) thieves, salaries are now pretty horrendous even by African measures. Yet, Western hacks continue to peddle the complete nonsense that Ukraine is changing for the better. Kiev’s tightly-controlled media bangs the same drum. Meanwhile, anybody capable of rational thought must surely be starting to realize that Ukraine is behaving, more and more, like the world’s largest, open-air, lunatic’s asylum.

Lukashin writes: “In the year following the great "revolution of dignity,” Ukraine has been successful in building towards a specific type of economy, mostly similar to that of a "banana republic.” In fact, there is only one difference between Ukraine’s current path and its banana brethren in faraway Africa, Latin America, and Asia. That is complete lack of bananas.

“There are numerous reasons why the EU - and the West in general - do not need Ukraine in its current form. It simply doesn't fit the EU's political, economic, or cultural framework. If it did, Ukraine would have successfully integrated already in the previous 24 years it has tried to. If it did, the EU wouldn't allow Ukrainian standards of living drop to African levels after the "pro-European" violent takeover. Ukraine would enjoy the open borders, economic benefits, and other hallmarks of European acceptance it thought it would receive shortly after "choosing Europe,” he adds.

Pray for Ukraine
Of course, there is a question never asked by Western supporters of Ukraine’s “European choice.” What exact role would Ukraine fulfill in the EU, if it ever were allowed to join? While I accept that the very thought is ludicrous, many frequently embellish and claim that Kiev will eventually accede to the EU. Brussels is incapable of saving Greece, so how would it finance a decrepit state which makes Greece look like Switzerland? Also, how would the British people react to 45 million (extremely poor) Ukrainians gaining access to the UK labor market - and, more importantly, its welfare system?

“Ukraine was built for a different economic model, with different markets and economic partners in mind. Specifically, the giant Russian market, which supported Ukraine through mutually beneficial trade, huge fossil fuel discounts, and Soviet-era economic connections. Cooperation with Russia kept Ukraine afloat until now and even provided an economic base which, as it turned out, allowed the country to grow a sizable population of hipsters and office workers that forgot why they needed all this unfashionable and smelly industry,” argues Lukashin.

Amid all this, the next economic ‘challenge’ facing Ukraine’s embattled citizens is new ‘European-style’ utility bills due to land in the coming weeks. Charges will be doubled, with a further 40 percent increase slated for the autumn. These new prices create the very real possibility that utility charges could exceed pensions. A potential humanitarian disaster is possible in winter.

Lukashin concludes with these pertinent words, “The social and economic catastrophe that the country keeps sliding towards is, to large extent, the consequence of our citizens’ support of the governments that got them there, the political ideals they worshipped, as well as Ukrainians believing that everybody else owes them something. The USA owes them because Ukraine is supposedly fighting Russia. Europe, because Ukraine supposedly protects it from Russia's supposed aggression and Russia, simply because Ukrainians are so wise and great that Russians should naturally admire and serve them.”

During the initial Euromaidan protests and subsequent coup, many Ukrainians changed their social media profile pictures to an English language graphic, titled “Pray for Ukraine.” While things were far from perfect then, the real suffering had yet to start.

Ukraine’s forces open fire on positions of pro-Russia fighters in Donetsk: Report

Quote:

Ukraine’s forces on Saturday opened fire on positions of pro-Russia fighters in the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR) in eastern Ukraine, reports say.

“The Ukrainian forces opened fire against the DPR militant positions near the airport at around 9 a.m. [local time],” the Donetsk News Agency quoted a DPR military source as saying.

“During the shelling, the enemy was firing 82-millimeter mortars, grenades and small arms,” the source said.

Meanwhile, Ukrainian presidential spokesman Andriy Lysenko said two Ukrainian military servicemen have been injured in the special operation zone in Donbas over the past 24 hours.

“This [the injuries] happened because of the detonation of a tripwire mine near Zaitseve,” Lysenko said.

Kiev’s military press center claimed in a separate message posted on its social media page that eastern Ukraine fighters had committed multiple violations of the terms of a shaky ceasefire between the two sides of the conflict.

“Over the past 24 hours, they have opened fire 38 times against the Ukrainian Armed Forces' positions,” the press center said on its Facebook page.

MOSCOW (Sputnik) — The self-proclaimed Donetsk Peoples' Republic (DPR) has rejected Kiev's offer to send UN Security Council member states' representatives to the region in order to discuss a peacekeeping mission in Donbas, the DPR envoy to the Minsk peace talks said Friday.

"I would like to remind [everyone] that there is a package of measures for implementing the Minsk agreements, which was signed on February 12, 2015. According to article 3 of the document, control and verification are entrusted to the special OSCE monitoring mission. No representatives from the UN or from other peacekeeping organizations are provided for," Denis Pushilin said as quoted by the Donetsk news agency.

Kiev's offer is its latest attempt at revising the Minsk protocols, Pushilin added, stressing that such instances are non-conductive to implementing the peace agreement.

(JTA) — Vandals wrote “kill the Jews” on a synagogue in the central Ukrainian city of Cherkasy. In a separate incident, unidentified persons torched a wreath that an Israeli cabinet minister had placed for Holocaust victims in Kiev.

The incident involving a synagogue was discovered on Wednesday in Cherkasy , Eduard Dolinsky, the director of the Ukrainian Jewish Committee, wrote on Facebook. In addition to spray-painting the message of incitement to violence against Jews on an external wall, the perpetrators wrote: “Jews annexed Ukraine.”